Níl ann ach raiméis : It’s nothing but nonsense

Although Ramiéis has been pretty much dead this past 6-12 months I still want to wish loyal readers who continue to pop by regularly and in particular those who have continued to respond to my infrequent posts a very Merry Christmas and wonderful new year!

Man, i’m very disappointed today.
Ever since I first saw the game Spore advertised I have been anxiously awaiting its release. The pre-release advertisements looked absolutely deadly. The problem is development took so bloody long I totally forgot about the game and missed its official release earlier this month.

I just remembered it this morning and popped on over to Amazon to pick myself up a copy. However, the first thing I noticed was the absolutely shit reviews the game is getting. Not only have they removed some of the important functionality & complexity of the game i.e. how you designed your creature affects the way it moves/operates in the game etc., but apparently they have included nonsensical DRM restrictions which means you can only install the game a total of 3 times!

Now you might think you only need to install a game once but the problem is if you have any problems running the game (common on windows of course) you may need to re-install the game; if you update windows you may need to re-install or if you upgrade or change hardware you may need to re-install and with a limit of 3 installs you’ll soon run out of these and end up with a worthless CD. EA might grant you additional installs but there’s no guarantee.

Spore had a chance to be a ground breaking game but with the removal of key features and an essential dumbing down of the game it has resulted in a massive disappointment which isn’t worth a fraction of the retail price. Add to that the DRM and you have a game design team that deserves to be shown the door.

I’ve long been a fan of EA Games/Sports but they have utterly failed to impress on this one and the addition of idiotic DRM restrictions they have me seriously questioning if I will ever buy an EA Games PC game ever again.

I haven’t had time at all at all for posting recently. Apologies. Tings are hectic.
To keep up amused here’s a cool site I discovered today Irish Slang Dictionary.
Of course everyone else probably discovered it yonks ago but I’m a bit behind the times these days.

The kids are back to school this week throughout the country; indeed some started back last week. My own wee one, as I mentioned previously, has transferred to a Gaelscoil and is settling in well despite not having much Irish.

I’m a big supporter of Gaelscoileanna; there is no better way of learning the language than to be completely immersed in it. So I was pleased to see that there are four new Irish-medium Primary schools who opened their doors for the first time this month in the Republic; in Lurgan, Edenderry, Greystones & Rush; and one new school in the North, in Dungannon Co. Tyrone.
This brings the number of Irish medium schools outside the Gaeltachtaí to 171* primary schools and 44 secondary schools.

*Interesting to note that almost 50% of the primary schools in the country, including new and long established schools, are in “temporary” accommodation, but that’s an issue for another day.

Posted by maca on September 3, 2008 Comments Off

We briefly tried to set up a hurling club in Finland some years back; here’s a mail the now non-existent club got this morning:

Dear sir,

The management of Admiral sports international Lfc, which to express their mission and goals in sport to your adorable and magnificent football club. We are into seeking, scouting and placement of players into clubs , and also organize trials for players in Europe and other Continents. If we are welcome by your management, kindly send us invitation letter for trials in your club. The following players are free and cleared by Nigeria Football Association to lace boot for any clubs of their choice outside the country.

You can choose any that you may need their service among all of them, it is not compulsury all of them but if you have vacancies for all our management can sponsor their trip. We will be very happy if our letter can be consider.

Today is the day Google are set to release a windows beta version of their new web browser Google Chrome (edit: @ 4am Irish time apparently). I for one am not too excited but I suppose I’ll download, test and uninstall it just to satisfy my curiosity.
If you want to get an idea of what Chrome is all about you can check out Google’s pretty naff “comic” or have a look at TecCrunch’s first images of the browser.

Is the web world ready for another web browser? I dunno, all I know is that i’m not too bothered about it.